 at 6 p.m. on Monday, January 18th. I'll call to order this regular meeting of the Wenuski City Council. Please join us in the Pledge of Allegiance led by Deputy Mayor Hal Colston. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. Thank you. Agenda review, any questions, concerns about the order of tonight's agenda? Moving on to public comments. I don't see any members of the public in the Zoom attendance. Are there any present in council chambers? No. All right. So we'll move then to our consent agenda. Oh, actually, okay. I just saw someone join. So before moving on, we're at the public comment part of the meeting. If a member of the public wishes to speak on anything that's not included in tonight's agenda, now would be the time and you could raise your hand in Zoom or put a message in the chat. And if you're here for something that's on the agenda, you can wait till we get to that point. Moving on from public comment then to the consent agenda. We have our city council meeting minutes from January 10, counts payable work for January 13 and payroll work for the period of 1226 to 108 and our annual mileage certification. Are there any questions about the consent agenda items? Any questions for members of the public? All right. Do I have a motion to approve the consent agenda? So moved. Second. Second. Motion by Jim, second by Bryn. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you. All right. Council reports. Bryn, would you like to start? Sure. Don't have a ton of report. We do have another departure on the municipal infrastructure commission. Our chair, our long time chair, Laura Dulegalecki is stepping down after seven years. A remarkable tenure that will be hard to fill. We will certainly miss her skill and commitment to the commission a great deal. So we anticipate having some new members on board in the near future should be completing interviews this week and hopefully coming to the council next week. If not next week then certainly early February. So a little bit more, a couple more changes there but we will certainly miss everyone that has committed their time to the infrastructure commission and welcome new folks to the commission as they have interest. So there's that. And also wanted to mention that the American Red Cross is doing a blood drive at the senior center on Friday and there might be some slots left to donate. So I believe we might have a link to that on some of our city web, city social media pages, if not in the front porch forum but certainly want to encourage folks to donate blood if they are able to. Other than that, I don't have any other updates. How any updates from you? The only update I have is that the legislature is now back in session as a hybrid format. So I just got back from Montpelier. It's great to be in person with most of my committee members and I don't feel like a Zoom zombie right now. That's great. Thanks Hal. Except for these meetings. Jim, any council reports? Nothing to report on that happened over the past week, but we do have an off cycle housing commission meeting that's coming Thursday at 6pm due to scheduling conflicts. We are holding it at our normal fourth Monday time. And we are going to be discussing the housing trust fund rollout as well as continuing our discussion around housing quality issues. So certainly invite any members of the public to participate in that discussion if you have something to share or want to learn more about the commission's work. Thank you. And Mike. Hello everybody. I have nothing to report tonight. Thank you. I have two updates. Last week the finance commission met reviewed ARPA outreach plans with staff. So just as an update, Angela and Yaz are coordinating some community meeting members with, meetings with community members to get some initial input on how the pandemic has impacted them. We'll have similar conversations via commissions in February. Also got their input on the budget presentation that I've been working with Wendy and Angela on for town meeting day, which will finalize after next week's final vote. Planning commission also met last week. Eric presented them with some potential zoning changes that could be made throughout our regulations. In support of trying to incentivize the creation of more free bedroom and larger housing following the conversation that we had at council late last year. That conversation will continue at their next meeting next Thursday. So not this week with the following. And then want to update you all that our consultant has posted the city manager role again. It's back out there. I'm connecting with the school board this week to finalize who from there will be participating in our search committee to help with the semifinal selections. Once that is all ironed out, I'll provide another more detailed update here. And with that, I will pass it to Wendy for city updates. Great, thank you, Mary. Just have a couple of items. One is the weekend storm and the cleanup following. It was the first storm of the season and the first significant storm and we appreciate everyone's help. Thanks for getting your cars off the road and we're able, because of the two day closure to clear up some ice that had established. So that's good. And then an update on the election coming up. As you know, we have two open seats and the legislation not allowing petitions to be submitted without signatures has passed. And my understanding is it has been signed by the governor. So how if you could set me straight, if that's not correct. So folks who are interested in running can download a petition from our website or come to the clerk's office and get one. And they do not need signatures this year. They do need to be returned to the clerk by the 24th by next Monday. What time of day? Five. Five p.m.? Yes. Okay, thank you. And that's all I have, thank you. Great, thank you. So moving into our regular items, the first item on the agenda is discussion of the FY23 budget. So we have seen all of our presentations from staff receive the information. Next Monday we'll make our final vote what we will present to voters on town meeting day. Tonight's an opportunity to ask any questions you have of staff request any additional information that you'd like to see. And also discuss, if you wanna discuss as a council things that you're thinking about, it's open space. And I'll share, we all got an email wait today with a five year capital improvement plan documents from Angela. That's something that I had requested next week. We'll also receive some updated data from chief Audi related to the fire truck on vote. So that will be coming as well before we make a final decision. Oh, I can ask, I'll start because I do have a question at our recent meeting where we saw the raised assessment from Green Mountain Transit came in higher than projected in the budget. Angela, I think you said that you've had a plan to cover that gap. So just wanted to confirm that and hear a little more. So we have identified a potential source to cover that additional fee. It would be a change moving some of the salary in the police department budget to the regional programs for GMT. And that is related to the existing vacancies and the applicants that we are seeing come in for those vacancies not meeting the threshold required to be at the step that we included in the budget. So that's where we've identified that potential savings. Okay, thank you for that. And so to be clear at the moment, we are still projecting the 2.89% increase with everything that's been presented thus far. That is correct. And then it might be helpful to hear what you all are thinking if the consumer price index comes in substantially higher than what's currently budgeted for or what you can share so far. So I did respond to a question about this earlier. Per our personnel policies, we only are obligated to provide CPI increases per the Bureau of Labor and statistics in our union contracts. We have typically followed that for our non-union staff as well. The non-union policies simply state that you have a cost of living increase annually and it can be just what we've gotten the budget, which means that our unions would potentially increase more than non-union staff. That could cause pay scale compression issues with management and leadership positions being paid less than union members in the future. The current AFSCME contract is also expiring on June 30th of this fiscal year. And so that is up for negotiation right now. So there's the potential that we could negotiate with them regarding the CPI for the coming year. However, the police union contract is newly in effect. This is the first year of a three year contract for them. Thanks, Angela. So I think that's just something for everyone on council to be aware of if these numbers are super high next year after these votes are taken, we could be in some hard conversations. And they are currently trending high in the projections. I've gone back to the website that we use for our estimates for February to February. In September, they were estimating three and a half in October, they were still three and a half. They are now projecting six and a half percent for February to February. This is, I believe the December to December amount that came out is seven percent. And I've heard that that is the highest that CPI has been in 40 years. And I think that it would be a hard discussion. Obviously you don't wanna have discrepancies in pay rates. That's something you think about. And also this budget doesn't actually include like any additional staff or services, right? So if things did get really tight, we would be talking about potential reductions. I don't know. So I just want folks to have that in mind even towards the future. That what we are voting on next week is a total amount, not a rate. We will be able to raise whatever money voters approved for us in Manhattan to work with. Do any other member, Brynne, go ahead. Yeah, I have a question. So given the stimulus funds, when do we anticipate seeing that in the budget? Would that be an adjustment? Or would that be part of FY24? When do we kind of see that in terms of project opportunities and income? Are you referencing ARPA? Yes. We have ARPA money already in hand. We have about a million dollars. ARPA money is being tracked separately in its own fund so that we are better able to provide grant reporting when we need to turn that over to the federal government. At this point, we are not projecting to use that for general city operations, though the new final rule that was issued by the Treasury gives us a little bit of latitude in that, but it would not be a long-term solution. We would eventually need to increase taxes to offset those ARPA dollars as they phase out. So if we use them for operating costs. If we were to use them for operating costs, yeah. So how would we see that in the budget? You are not gonna see that in the budget. The ARPA fund is not a budgeted fund. It will be brought back to council for authorization for programs when we start making funding allocations other than things that council has already authorized, which includes mass purchases for PPE for the public and staff. Okay, great. Yeah, and to add to that, after the sort of community conversations this month and in February, we still have a goal of putting out a community survey in March. And then being able to receive that information to make some allocation decisions this spring. Are there any members of the public attending who have questions or comments regarding the budget? Jim, go ahead. Thanks, sorry. It's a little bit quick there. I hope it didn't cut off the public comment. I'm curious, so this whole exercise we've been through over the last few months is really geared towards this presumed CPI increase. And what would be, if we were to try to achieve the same goals that we set out balancing at the beginning with what you proposed and this new CPI rate or even halfway in between what we started with and where we are now, give us sense of what the additional tax rate increase would be like roughly. So I did do the math on this for the mayor. The estimated impact to the general fund is approximately $126,000 or about two and a half cents. And do our liabilities in future years and assume that pay rates negotiated with union contracts aren't gonna be going down if there was a negative change in the CPI or at least a very low, I'm assuming there's a floor and then the CPI increase above that. They do have tiered COLA negotiated into their contract right now. The lowest is 1%, I believe in both contracts, maybe one and a half. All right, well, I will, it's hard to change course and pace at this point in the process. And I appreciate the sense that we have, we can make these decisions later. But I think we are at a point where it's probably prudent to at least talk about trying to still achieve the goals what we need to do for the tax rate. He said some of the tax rate is a lot. So if there's something in between because this is gonna be a structural issue we can deal with now or we can deal with later. Yeah, and I think like, you know, we're pushing a 3% increase as is which is higher than you want to see, right? But I think given where we're coming, the CPI is coming in, it's good that we've even staff has even been able to bring it under three potentially and still maintain the services and things that we are looking for. Is there any more data or information that you would want to see before the next Monday's meeting? Bryn, go ahead. Do we have a sense for how many other municipalities are going to experience a similar scenario as we will? Has there been any conversation from VLCT? I haven't seen anything and I'm not sure what other municipalities use as the basis for their cost of living increases. I know the school, I watched their meeting last week and they are having some significant increases as well with staffing costs. Yeah, I'm just curious. I'm sure that we're not the only ones and I would be curious what VLCT is hearing or what type of support they might be able to offer given that we are, as a state, facing this, granted there's some negotiated contracts there but for the most part, we're facing this significant CPI as a result of pandemic stimulus. So I just think it's, we haven't seen a CPI like this in 40 years, like Angela said. I can't imagine that this isn't ripe for opportunity for some additional support brainstorming from our legislators from VLCT just to try and mitigate the impact to our communities. I haven't seen any guidance come out from VLCT. I mean, I think everybody everywhere is facing escalating costs. Something I can reach out and ask about though. Wendy, I see your hand. Yeah, I was gonna say I can reach out to the managers. There has been discussion and lamentation about this because everybody is dealing with it but I'll reach out also. Thank you. Yeah, this is something that is hard to do like one-time assistance for because it does impact future earnings as well. So it's gonna be tacked on to next year's wages. In addition, those will also increase more as well. James, Hal, go ahead. Thanks, Mayor. You know, we're in the world of inflation right now. This is where we are. It's everywhere. It's no one's immune. And I don't know if it's so much about mitigation but about communication. How do we get out in front of this and communicate as to why this is what it is because we're all in it? Yeah, it was running the draft budget presentation by the finance commission was actually helpful. You know, something that got called out there was making sure we do share like the costs are going up this much but the city has managed to increase the rate even lower than that. So like we are doing work here. You all have done a lot of work to try to make that happen and make this easier to deal with for folks. We are trying to maintain that value of affordability for this community. Thank you. All right. If there is anything else that would be helpful to next week's vote, please just email Wendy and Angela and make a request. Yeah, we're happy to run modeling if you have ideas that you think we haven't thought of or you're looking to see how much something would cost along the lines of if Hola comes in at 6.5%, you know, we have the ability to run the impact models and can get that information for you in a pretty quick turnaround time. All right. Let's move on to item B. This is also just on for discussion. It is an update from the clerk's office on election procedures. Welcome, Jenny Willingham. Is this your first official clerk's appearance? It is. Yes. So good evening everyone. Contained in the packet that I, that is in your hands just a brief overview of where we are right now as far as our timelines. I've included a calendar which we go by to make sure that we're in compliance with everything. We have our all resident form that is available on our website. We had duplicate copies delivered today. So in case somebody is out in the field and they, a person registered to vote we're able to just give them the carbon copy as proof of registration instead of coming back here to the office. We have, I'll show you this, a nice brochure that Paul and Yaz designed and we just received these. So we have those right here at the counter. We also are having this printed in seven different languages. So those should arrive, it was six business days. So that should arrive Friday and then Paul was going to be responsible for putting these together and we will fold them up in our task in the clerk's office is we're just gonna fold them up and be ready for handouts. So that's an exciting thing. It contains a lot of information that's really pertinent. The other thing is just trying to wrap our heads around the logistics of how this is going forward. And so John Odom is the Montpelier city clerk who's also has all resident voting. And so he's been by, he came by last week he was supposed to come today but he had a COVID exposure so we'll wait. But just a way to keep those checklists separate but then they're going to immerse into one. We were thinking that if all the resident came in to vote not to go to another table but to have everything all into one checklist just to create transparency and just not to single out someone if we have any poll watchers that are observing that. So everybody is just gonna go on the same lines we'll have the one checklist that we're gonna merge together. So it's maintained separate so it's set up to be separate but then we'll merge those at the time of election. We're also gonna be printing out they'll also go into whatever voters that we have. I'm just gonna create a checklist and it's just gonna be really brief. Their name, their address and the year of birth. So there's no identifying numbers that would single out a person if they're a citizen or not. Let's see, as far as the handout we inserted a handout in our utility bills. There were about 1,750, I said 1,700 but it was 1,750 and we included just an overview of the election where they can come pick up petitions when absentee ballots will be available. We're expecting a timeline of February 9th that will receive our ballots and then our absentees will go out immediately after that and we're just trying to encourage people to, we're gonna set it up in here where people can vote in here in person or they can take the ballot with them or we'd be happy to mail the ballot. We do email our ballots to our overseas and military personnel so they will print out the ballot and send it back. So we just have to make sure that everything is returned to us by March 1st at 7 p.m. when the polls close. So hopefully the insert gave some insight on this. Today we have had one petition that is complete. He actually picked up the petition and brought it in. The signatures, he already had the signatures so I verified that today and told him that he was all set. Like we mentioned earlier, I will be here next Monday until five to accept any petitions. We haven't had any interest though. I haven't spoken to anybody so we're just encouraging people to, you know, if it's something they're interested in, feel free to contact us. It's available on our website actually because they don't have to have signatures, they don't have 30 signatures so all we need is a consent candidate form filled out how their name would like to be on the ballot and just turn that in by five o'clock next Monday. And they'll be added to the ballot. Counselor Colson talked about the bills. So that's for us, that's just alleviating the fact that somebody has to have 30 signatures in order to have a petition. So I think that's about it. If anybody has any questions for me about this but John Odom, I just want to emphasize, he's been a great help to our team. Trying to, he's more of a techie guru that I am. I'm more of a procedure person but he is, you know, he's trying to make this work and to make it as seamless as possible to keep with the intent that the legislature has designated. At this time, he has not had any voters and neither have we but we hope with some outreach that we have planned, Yaz has planned for February, 13th and then other events she has, hopefully we will have some people that will register to vote. Thanks for the update, Jenny. Sure. Grant, I see your hand. Yeah, I'd be interested to see what the event plan is and the communications plan is similar to how we saw an event or an outreach plan for the mask guidelines if one is available or could be shared with the council. Is it still the plan that we saw before with like the markets and food shopping stuff? Wendy, I saw your hand. Yes, we can send you the outreach plan if you like but we are on target. Great, great. Paul, did you have something to add? No, sorry, that was a, we'll be sure you get that, thanks. Okay, thank you. One point of clarification, the voter registration form here, is it just one form, no matter who like, do we have two separate forms now? We're just one. Two separate forms. It's two separate, okay. Right, and we have them both posted here that we'll give out when somebody comes in but one is more clear on, are you a citizen? Are you 18 years of older? This one is our resident, a legal resident of Winooski. So there's, with my team, we've kind of identified documentation that we will be asking if they do not have a driver's license or a non-driver ID. It would be a resident card or a visa or something that we can take a look at a utility bill if it happens to be their name. So we just need anything to confirm residency in Winooski. Thanks for clarifying. Jim, I saw your hand but they need to get down. Maybe the same question. No, I was gonna ask more about the road shows and opportunities to the other speaking with folks about this. When there are dates scheduled, I guess I'm curious if dates are kind of coming together or when we might know just so that the, like I would love to participate if possible when helpful. So if there are dates to block or hold, that'd be great to know soon. Hi Jim, that's a great question. I just wanted to jump in to let you know that, we are constantly thinking about and taking into account what is going on with the Omicron variant right now. And so at this point in time, what we are doing in place of the actual in-person road shows is we are setting up tabling at these events that it's gonna be kind of like an information group. But it is not going to have a live person who is available there. It's going to have all of these locations available for folks to pick up on their own and then have resources for them to reach out with questions. We are going to be fingers crossed on holding a community info night on voting on February. It's gonna be scheduled for February 13th at the O'Brien Community Center at the Sunday evening. And we are going to have interpreters there for the same languages that are being translated, but the interpreters are being translated for their eighties. And we're hoping to have that in person. We're hoping to do more in-person things. We are trying to keep an eye on what's going on in our community because we are absolutely kind of prioritizing how to receive all of our residents. And so asking people to come in at this point in time is not something that we felt was very serious. So then asking our staff to be able to be in-person we didn't feel like it would be a good decision at this point in time either, but we are able to pivot in-person if we do come down off of this rise anytime soon. So we'll see what happens for now. We're trying to keep COVID safe as possible. Okay, thanks for the update, Jess. How? Thanks, Mayor. Yeah, I've just reminded when Councilor Duncan talked about, you know, a rote show. I remember when I first ran for the legislature four years ago as a write-in, which I don't recommend, but I remember meeting with different groups of new Americans and literally having to sample ballot to like walk them through what it means to vote. We just can't assume they all understand if they're first time voters. So I would give real careful thought to how the rote show really plays out as an educational forum. So we did create a voting process, which is a step-by-step for when somebody is registering to vote or whether they register prior to that. So we have created that. Hopefully that will be of some assistance. We're gonna have people there to direct people just to try to help them as much. We're also having the ballots printed in seven languages. So those, that'll be about 48 hours after I scan the ballot to them. We'll have those and we're just gonna take one of each of the languages and laminate it and have that available at the polls. We'll have them here first in case we have people, but to bring those to the polls. So those will be in the seven languages that are most common. Yes, and also we have the videos that were recorded for the previous election cycle that actually do exactly what you were just describing, how that outlines what it looks like to go in and vote. The process really shows people, we have those circulating everywhere. And we also have polls really awesome with developing QR codes to be able to lead folks on the written material through those videos. So those are all inserted in all of the written materials as well. And that's also one of the goals of the information night is for Denny will be in attendance as well after that night and so for folks and then who do have questions about what it looks like, what's to be expected, what's gonna happen when they get there. We're hoping that the staff are able to guide them through that process on that night in whatever form that's going to take you. Are there any questions or comments from members of the public? You can always chat or use the raise hand feature to let us know if you wish to speak. There's a question in the chat about the library partnering. Yeah, and I think y'all are planning to put information there like the pamphlets and stuff. Yep, the library is one of our targeted locations for one of the table and set up to be set up. So that, as soon as we get all that information in once it's translated into that, thank you. There any other questions? Jim, go ahead. And I apologize that this was covered before, but since I noticed we have one of our school board members in attendance as well, I'm curious how the communication is gonna work for when we move from budget voting to budget presentations and kind of shared messaging with the school. Is that already part of it for them to be talking about this process and how to access it since it will govern both school board and or school and municipal elections? Is it gonna be included in their discussion of their budget? Are they linking three sources from their side? We are partnering, we have connected with the school around the outreach process that we are going through to get people to come in and be registered for people to attend a voting day and all the information around the election. Specific to the school budget, I am not sure what the school is planning on doing for that, but we are connected around how we're going to communicate that and so we're trying to make sure that we're lining in whatever that might be. I don't think there, are there any school representatives on this call right now? One of the board members is, Steven, if you want to share anything, feel free to raise your hand. But I know I haven't talked to the board chair or superintendent about telling me the presentations yet. We just haven't gotten to it yet. Okay, yeah. Do you want to bring Steven over? Hi, good evening. Sorry, I thank you. I watched into the room and heard something about school board members. How can I help? Yeah, we're just, I haven't coordinated with Tori or Sean or anything yet, but just talking about, as we present our budgets or communicate about each of our budgets and our open seats through the community, have we given you all enough information on all residents voting? So our budget presentations are going to be led by our finance subcommittee members who are Kamal and Alex. And I'm happy to pass the message to them and ask them to get in touch with you. I'll reach out to them. That's good to know. Thank you, Steven. Great, thanks. Are there any other questions, comments on elections outreach? All right. Hearing no others, we can move on. Thanks for all the thorough preparation. So item C, this is on for discussion or approval. It is a VCDP grant application selection update from Heather. Good evening, everyone. So we find ourselves in a unique position this year where we have so much development going on that I actually have three competing projects requesting that the city submit Vermont Community Development Program grant application. But per the guidelines of that grant program, we are only allowed as a municipality to submit one implementation grant project and all three of those fall under the implementation grant criteria. So rather than generally, this would be a pretty easy decision that's made operationally by staff, but because they are three good projects from three community partners that all do, to some extent meet some of our master plan goals, I thought it would be best to bring it to city council instead of making what could appear to be an arbitrary staff biased decision. So I brought to you tonight a rubric that is based on looking at the overall benefit to our community since staff time is actually paid for by our taxpayers, looking at what those benefits would be of each of these projects to our taxpayers would be one way of looking at how to make the decision about allocating staff time. These do have to be submitted by the municipality. I have done a couple of them successfully in the past and they are a pretty heavy lift. So it's a significant amount of work over a period of months. So I bring this before you with a rubric for you to make a decision. I have given it my best assessment of what the scoring would be, but I'd like to open that up for you all to have a conversation and make a decision ultimately which of these projects we would like to support. And just for the audience who may be watching, the three projects are as follows. Rehabilitation of the O'Brien Community Center to facilitate full lease up and to accommodate new partners bringing additional services for the community. Cathedral Square purchasing and converting our Lady of Providence to assisted living with a memory care wing. And the third is the main in Mansion Street 54 unit true mixed income housing development. With that, I'm happy to answer any questions or just open it up for your discussion. Thanks, Heather. I'll just call out for also for potential viewers. Part of the scoring is about supporting low income households in the city. The grant is focused on that, right? So that's also part of the scoring rubric. Yep, that's right. Thank you. Bryn. Thanks for putting this together, Heather. I really appreciate the detail and a direct rubric to review. Can you, speaking of the rubric specifically, can you just go over that? One is a summary and then two is, are you pulling criteria from the application requirements? Is that kind of compiled in here with what you think our best hit is that that is? Yeah, there. The last thing is just the, if you could just go provide a little bit more detail on the asterisk itself. Oh, sure, thank you. So for the scoring criteria, I used a couple of different things that I was looking at. One of them would be what would be most competitive with the grant. So in looking at the number of low income households to benefit, that's one of the goals of the grant. It's low to moderate. The reason that I used an asterisk and created a specific line of low income households below 60% area median income is because one of the projects very specifically serves people at that lower level. So in order to normalize the data across all three of the projects, I didn't include all the low to moderate income in Winooski. I made it all of the low income within that same bracket. So it was really just about normalizing the data across them or it would have been biased data for you. The other thing that I've used besides the eligibility and scoring criteria for the grant is really looking at how it aligns with the priorities that our community has established. And that's through the master pangles and through the city council annual priorities and strategies. So just making sure that we are keeping staff focused on the priorities that we've identified and that we'll provide the benefit to the community that we're looking for this year. And then not second guessing you at all. Is there any chance that any of these projects would fit into one of the other grant categories? Not really. No. And then this is an annual opportunity, is that correct? No, it's more frequent than that. There will also be a fall cycle. So it really was all of them were looking for that April application. We don't yet have the dates of that cycle, but generally there is one in September or so. Okay. It comes a few months later. So there are more opportunities. We're all competing for the same slot. Okay, great. That is very useful information. Thank you. Any questions or public comments on this one? I'll pass it to Mike. But members of the public, you can always use the raise hand at any point. Go ahead, Mike. Heather, which entity could, which entity would benefit the most from this grant? Do you have an answer for that? Not really. I mean, any of those entities would really like to have an additional $500,000. I know that there are gaps in the funding for each of the other two projects that are not the city project. And then, you know, you look at the benefit will be to Winooski overall. And that really depends on how you analyze the data, you know, over what time period you analyze it. So I think it would benefit any of those properties. And I do think there are additional opportunities to make an application later in the year as well. So out of the three projects, they're going forward, regardless of this grant, correct? Not necessarily, no. So without going for the Vermont Community Development Program grant, the O'Brien Community Center rehabilitation may not be going forward. We have not budgeted any funds for that in our budget. So a grant would be what would allow us to that project. There are other ways that we could go about trying to fund that, but those would require a bond vote. Those would, you know, there would be a lot more conversation to have there. All right. I'm confused about the O'Brien Center one. So that's why I think... So what I can tell you is this, that we are having conversations with partners, as you know, they are confidential at this point in time. So we're not able to share that. And if we were to get a Vermont Community Development Program grant, that would allow for us to start on rehabilitation of spaces within the O'Brien Community Center, which could then be utilized to accommodate some of the partners that we've been discussing discussions with, that can provide some of the services that our community has expressed interest in. Thank you. Are there any other questions from folks? I'll say, I personally agree with the rubric findings, right? Like based on the program reading through the program qualifications and considering these three projects, I see the O'Brien Center rehab as having a greater value and impact for the intended audience. So I would be amenable to moving that forward. Hal, go ahead. Thank you, Mayor. Yeah, I agree with you, Mayor. I think that from what I can discern from this rubric, that the most impact on our community would be OCC. And I just think that this would be a great opportunity to help it reemerge and be re-birthed into what it needs to be so that we can have the most people impacted in our community who are designated as low income to benefit. Jim, go ahead. Yep, I'll chair on that assessment. I think that we know the OCC is needed for what it could be and the types of services that we need to provide there. If this gets us a step closer to realizing that and making this place what it could be, I'm all for it. So this is on for discussion or approval. We could punt to a future meeting or someone could make a motion. Bryn, see your hand. I would like to make a motion to approve the funding to go to the O'Brien Community Center as proposed by the staff. So moved. Motion by Bryn, second by Hal. All those in favor, please say aye. Hi. Hi. Motion carries. Thank you very much. Thank you. An item D, also on for discussion approval. This is, what does it stand for? Unified something work plan grants, right, John? Yeah, it's a tricky one. It's unified planning work program grants. Yeah, correct. This is an annual offering from the regional planning folks or Chinning County regional planning folks. So they come out with these grants applications and it's typically to fund transportation projects, planning projects, water quality projects throughout the county. So we typically apply. So you've probably seen this before. This is how we funded the parking study, the east down scoping study, even the preliminary sort of mainstream project scoping studies. So it's an offering we usually go for every year. So this year, we are proposing three potential projects if you want to move forward with those. So Eric is, I will say Eric's out tonight. So I'm covering sort of the project he would administer. But so we have three projects and we've talked about, I think the three of them during our budget discussions as well, but I'll just cover them quick. One is a bike pad master plan that Eric would cover. That would look at sort of detailed potential routes well throughout the city to make connections with our current facilities and where folks want to see enhanced bike and pedestrian routes. That would build upon previous plans like our transportation master plan and the parks and open space plan. The other projects that falls in the transportation category is the La Fountain Streets slash Diane scoping study. We talked about that one kind of detail during the budget but that is a pretty typical scoping study type project where we're basically, we're looking at potential alternatives if we move to do a reconstruction project on that corridor in the future and we get public engagement to look at potential improvements if we're reconstructing the corridor. So we'd have discrete alternatives and it'd be geared towards improving multimodal bike pad uses. And then the third potential application would be it's sewer funds. It's a sewer fund project. So it's a phase two stormwater inspection that's really to help us on the water quality side in stormwater. So we've done this project previously with UPWP funding and we've done one third of the city and we found it to be really, really useful data because we're able to better map our stormwater system, figured out some pipe sizes and we were able to observe where we had some problems that we had to address pretty immediately like block pipes and some collapse pipes. So pretty useful project and this next phase would probably be another quarter of the city. Eventually we would probably one more phase where we can wrap up the city, but we've got this next phase, potentially the sort of northwest section of the city and then probably moving on to the northeast section. So those are kind of the three projects. I did include a memo that gives some detailed info on the two balance rescoping and the sewer project. The other thing Eric wanted me to mention is that the planning commission does support the bike head application. So one, I guess final piece, so the funding side. So the projects do require a 20% match in funds from the city. So we're estimating the bike head project costs about $80,000 based on Eric's discussion with the RPC folks and other bike head projects they've done. So that's about a $16,000 match for the city. The other general fund transportation projects will found three scoping study. That's probably about a $60,000 project based on our discussions with RPC, so 12 grand. So in total, that'd be a $28,000 match for the city for FY23. And as we mentioned in the budget presentation, that is currently not in the current FY23 budget. So if we were awarded those projects, we would have to come back to you for fund balance requests, or if we were able to find funds within the FY23 budget that were not being used. So that's how we funded some of these projects previously, if we're under spending a professional service line, we were able to pull it out of there. But just wanted to make you aware of that because I know our discussion before about COLA and what's going on, that's something obviously you wanna think about. And then the sewer fund stormwater project that is currently funded in the budget, we're pretty confident that project would move forward since we did a phase one. So that project is in total $75,000, so the $15,000 match that's included. So these are competitive grants, so it's not to say we're not harm-sensure that we would get them, but the application deadline is this Friday for the grants. So with that, I think the ask is, if you all are in support of us submitting for these applications, you would go ahead and do that Friday or if you wanted this to pull it back a little bit, we can also do that for the request. Thanks, John. Do these compete with each other? Or are they like in different categories or anything? The stormwater one doesn't. The two transportation ones will and we have to prioritize them for funding. So I think we would, talking to Eric, we'd prioritize the bike pad because that's what we've heard from folks in the community that they want to see more bike pad improvements. So yeah, in a sense, it would be. I would agree with that based on the previous conversation we had during budget, but that would be higher priority. And then to be clear, the match money would potentially come from reserves, assuming there's not enough in the budget. Correct, yeah. Okay, thanks. Do other folks have questions? Mike, go ahead. John, can we recap this a little bit? So you're saying the sewer plan is already budgeted in FY23, correct? Correct. Okay, and the other, the stormwater and the bike pad master plan are not? The two transportation general funds are not because we're not sure that we, since they are competing against each other, we didn't want to include them both because we may not get them. Okay, because if they're not already in there and we have to add that on something that we're already high on, I was thinking of trying to find a question on how to ask to the council and city staffers on how we can cut back the budget through all departments. So it's not so high, especially if the CIP comes in high. I'm not sure if I'm comfortable with adding something to something that's not budgeted yet in FY23. I don't know how others feel about that, but. The request is not to add this to the FY23 budget. If the grant is awarded, we would come back to council for requests for assignment of reserves. Okay. And we're comfortable with using those reserves on these items at this point. That would be up to council. That's what I'm asking, I mean. You wouldn't be authorizing that right now. What we would do is we would come back to you if this is awarded to the city and say, okay, we've been awarded the funds. Now we would like to request the use of reserves. We wouldn't want to do that ahead of time because you could potentially assign the use of reserves for a grant that's not awarded. So we would not come to you until we've been told that we have access to those funds. Yeah, it's kind of wise. Oh, sorry, go ahead. I was just gonna say we have like 970,000 on assigned reserves. Yep. Go ahead. At the time we brought back to you the project with a request for assignment of reserves, something had changed where we are no longer comfortable assigning reserves to that. If the council chose to decline, we could decline the award. As long as we did not execute a grant agreement, we can always decline funding. Yeah, I was just gonna clarify. So the schedule for this grant is submission Friday. We went here until May, usually mid May, what's been awarded. And then the projects would get, if we decided to accept the project in forward and went until July. I'll say kind of piggybacking on Mike's sentiments, like the bike pad plan seems a higher priority than the Low Fountain study. And I do still wonder if we had a bike pad plan going, if that could take care of some of the questions about what to do on Low Fountain and make that a scoping study for that less necessary. Jim. I'll just say I'm in support of spending a dollar and getting four. So I think getting these applications in, even if it means we're gonna have to allocate reserves, make sense to me. Any public comment, questions? Are there any more council questions? Brynn? Do, I'm just thinking about funding commitments. Do we have any more information about where GMT increase funding for that maybe come from? Happy to explain. Christine asked this question earlier during the FY23 budget presentation. We are currently planning to cover the GMT costs with some money that we've budgeted for police vacancies that we don't believe will be needed. And so we'll use the reserves if a grant is awarded. Bind us to recovering that in the next fiscal cycle. That would not be required. We have more than enough reserves to meet our fund balance policy. The reserve allocation that you received in your packet is indicating all of the reserves that are unassigned and are available for council use on one time and capital projects that are not operational and not needed year to year. So UPWP projects are on an annual basis. This isn't something that would create a continuing commitment over time. Okay. So I think somebody wants to make a motion because I feel like we want at least some of this. So I think there could be a motion to approve both letters of support or a motion to approve with changes. I'd like to move approval of both letters of support. Second. Motion to approve by Jim, second by Hal. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. All right, that motion carries. Thanks all. Thanks, John. This brings us to the end of our agenda this evening. Can I have a motion to adjourn? So moved. Second. Motion by Bryn, second by Jim. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you, everyone. Have a good evening. Good night, everyone. Good night.